We gave respondents two options on the matter in our recent monthly survey:

I want Scotland to become an independent country, and leave the United Kingdom.

22 per cent of respondents backed this view

I do not want Scotland to become an independent country, and leave the United Kingdom.

78 per cent of respondents supported this view.

I appreciate that four in five of Party members not wanting Scotland to leave is an overwhelming majority, but that one in five take the opposite view is in one sense remarkable – this is the Conservative and Unionist Party, after all.

It is also disappointing. I am all for justice for England. But we would all be smaller were Scotland to go. None the less, it could be worse. I guessed that the upper end for that point of view would be about one in three members. The result is some way short of it.

It does of course reflect the political gap that has been opening up between Scotland and England for a very long time. A ConservativeHome survey before the last election found the new generation of candidates to be “barely Unionist”.

In that sense, then, the finding is unremarkable. It’s also worth noting the difference between Party members’ response to the question and that of the readers more widely, which was as follows.

I want Scotland to become an independent country, and leave the United Kingdom.

30 per cent of respondents backed this view.

I do not want Scotland to become an independent country, and leave the United Kingdom.

70 per cent of respondents backed this view.

Which yet again indicates that there is a significant difference between those reading ConservativeHome who are Party members and those who are not. The latter are more right-wing Tory/UKIP-supporting in flavour. None the less, even in this instance over two-thirds of respondents are for the Union.

Almost 900 Party members replied to the survey. Its results are tested against a control panel supplied by YouGov.